What happens if a customer purchases an in-stock item and a pre-order item with different fulfillment dates on Shopify?

Understanding how Split Shipping in Checkout works on Shopify

When a customer purchases an in-stock item and a pre-order item with different fulfillment dates on Shopify, we called this a “mixed cart”.

If you've enabled Shopify’s Split Shipping in Checkout feature, your customer’s order will be split into two shipments automatically.

Your customers will have the freedom to choose different shipping options for each fulfilment, but will have to pay for their own additional shipping (instead of you having to pay for their shipping, twice).

If a customer would like to wait for their in-stock item to be shipped with their pre-order item together (to save on shipping costs), you can visit their specific order and put the in-stock item's fulfillment "On Hold" manually. Then edit their order and refund the additional shipping fees they've paid for.

You should mention this as an option on your product pages and in your order confirmation email that they should inform you ASAP after they've placed their “mixed cart” order.

Steps to automatically hold all fulfillments for mixed carts using Flow

You can follow these steps to automatically place all fulfillments On Hold when a mixed cart order is placed (a pre-order item and a regular in-stock item).

This will be our final Flow:

To begin, from the Shopify admin, open the Flow app.

Create a new Flow and name it appropriately (e.g. "Hold order fulfillments if order contains a pre-order item").

Choose "Order created" for the Flow trigger.

Add a condition to check if the order is a mixed cart order. The conditions for this are shown below:

IF:

• At least one of order / line items
  • At least one of custom attributes
    • Equal to: _EarlyBird
    • AND
    • Equal to: Pre-order

AND:

• At least one of order / line items
  • Selling plan id
    • Empty or does not exist

Create an action for when this condition is true and choose "Hold fulfillment order".

Select "OTHER" as the reason, and enter some custom text, e.g. "Waiting for all items to be in-stock."

You can optionally tick the box to Notify customers of the hold, but this shouldn't be necessary if you've made it clear on your product page that items will be shipped together.

Save your Flow.

Make sure you Activate it too to make it live. You can now place a test mixed cart order, or wait for a real one to see it in action.

Once an order is placed which meets these conditions, you'll see the Hold appear automatically:

Steps to hold and combine fulfillment on Shopify manually

To manually hold and combine fulfillment for mixed cart orders on Shopify, follow these steps:

Hold Fulfillment

1. From Shopify Admin, go to Orders
2. Find the customer’s mixed cart order you want to put on hold
3. In the Unfulfilled section, click the ... menu and select Hold fulfillment.
4. Choose the items to put on hold and select a reason from the dropdown menu.
5. Click Hold fulfillment.

Combine Fulfillment

1. Go to Orders in your Shopify Admin again.
2. Click the order you want to merge fulfillments for.
3. In the Unfulfilled section, click the ... menu and select Merge fulfillment.
4. Select the items you want to combine into one fulfillment.
5. Click Merge fulfillment.

Release Fulfillment

1. Wait for the pre-order items to arrive
2. Go to the customer’s mixed cart order again and select “Release fulfilment”
3. Now you can fulfill both the in-stock and pre-order item to be shipped together.

You can paste the following into your product page description on Shopify, and/or in your Shipping policy to let your customers know about this option:

Product Page Description

If your order contains both a pre-order product and an in-stock product, we can combine them into a single shipment to save on shipping costs. By default, orders may be shipped separately, which could result in additional shipping charges. If you prefer to wait and have all items shipped together, please let us know in the 'Special Order Instructions' box at checkout or contact our Customer Support team immediately after placing your order."

Shipping Policy

We understand that some orders may include both pre-order and in-stock items. By default, these items may be shipped separately, which could result in additional shipping charges. If you'd like to combine your shipment and wait for all items to be ready, please indicate this in the 'Special Order Instructions' box at checkout or reach out to our Customer Support team as soon as possible. We'll be happy to hold your in-stock items and ship everything together once your pre-order items arrive.

Need help?

If you have any questions about managing split shipping for your Shopify pre-orders, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn or email us at hello@shopside.com.au to see how we can help!